...AND..YOU ARE...THE YOUNGEST OF FOUR?

We are the people our parents warned us about. ~ Jimmy Buffett


The taxi stopped in front of his house, and there was his father standing at the gate. I never realized how much exactly of a coward I was, until I saw myself deliberately stepped outside the taxi and stood unmoved, waiting for R to walk round the other side of the taxi towards me, so that I didn't have to approach the gate alone.

"This is L," he said to his dad, the way he introduced me to his colleagues, using a somewhat formal tone. I knew that the two of them didn't really talk, and there was even a time when R refused to speak to his father for close to a year, if I remember correctly. But his father made to hold him, which surprised me, and then stopped halfway and shook the son's hand formally, which surprised me even more.

"L," the older man murmured, smiling. "This is R's house. Come inside." He looked so fragile I couldn't believe what I'd heard about him. And he was so quiet. He reminded me of someone.... of a man I could sit across for hours in silence, and both of us wouldn't mind it -- and it dawned slowly on my foggy brains that the man I was thinking of was his very own son.

His mother took both my hands and seemed to talk non-stop for five hours. She told me she was expecting everybody to come: by 'everybody' she meant all of her children and their spouses and their children, except for one son who lived in Malang. She was preparing somebody's birthday dinner, I knew, one of her granddaughter's. It wasn't supposed to be a big deal, I thought, but there she was talking with everybody on the phone, making sure everybody was coming. I overheard her mentioning me over the phone, telling her eldest daughter who was in Puncak that she simply had to come, because I was there. ("But everybody will be there," I remembered him saying, "Are you nervous?").

So there I was, for more than five hours, amidst children and roasted beef and tiramisu, barefooted and silent most of the time, kept being asked where I worked ("But aren't you a student?") and whether I was the youngest of four siblings and whether my siblings were all married; watching R's siblings and in-laws ate and talked loudly -- three generations pretending to be merry and trying to cover up a family breaking apart.

Do we really turn into our parents? ("I notice that my dad and I have some similarities, it scared me to think I might turn into him", R once said). I really hope we don't. (I spent the night eyeing his father, dreading him, dreading what that man was and had actually been capable of doing.)


For a thousand times I repeated to myself that he wouldn't turn into his father.

At the end of the night he, like a man of his father's quality, drove me home in almost complete silence. As we reached my house though, he managed to say something a man of his father's quality wouldn't be able to say.

I stepped out of the car, dizzy with the memory of his buzzing family. Wanting to assure him that I was not a person of his father's quality either, I told him that I loved him, too.